1. Field of the Present Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a maintenance server, a maintenance method, a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium in which the maintenance program is stored, and a management server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Manufacturers of copying machines, multifunction peripherals (MFPs), printers, and the like (hereinafter, referred to collectively as image forming apparatuses) have made various contrivances to centralizedly manage image forming apparatuses installed in customers' sites and do remote maintenance.
For example, in a typical system, the customers' image forming apparatuses are not managed by respective service shops. Instead, a center is provided to manage the image forming apparatuses in an integrated manner. The center provides information for managing maintenance and inspection schedules, including the usages of the image forming apparatuses and peripheral equipment, to the service shops. This can reduce man-hours of the service shops for managing the customers' equipment.
In another typical system, a server obtains customer information about customers with which sales shops have traded in products, as well as product information. The server extracts other customers having the same attributes as those of the traded customers, and provides the product information about the traded products for sales shops in charge of the extracted customers.
The remote maintenance system is mostly used by sales companies and sales shops which sell image forming apparatuses. Since fees are charged for use, a trial contract is sometimes concluded for a trial operation before an actual contract to use the system. After the effectiveness of the system is confirmed, the actual contract is concluded to start official operations.
If a sales company or the like performs a trial operation before official operations, the sales company or the like becomes unable to use the system at the end of the trial operation. History information about image forming apparatuses acquired during the trial period is discarded. This means a problem that the sales company or the like that conducts official operations after the trial operation cannot use the history information of the trial operation for the official operations.